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The Best Of Planetary Explorers
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's timeline is published today on the top seventy five events in recent planetary explorations. Since June and July inaugurates three new landers going to Mars, it is curious to see their selected images: Venusian crust hot enough to melt lead, comets colliding with Jupiter, Europa's frozen ocean. But the most precious discoveries may be those chalked up as nearly free riders: the fifteen Mars rocks that annually are found among Antarctic meteors [100 grams total] and all those four and half million personal computers doing SETI@home CPU cycles."
Teaching everybody the metric system and getting them all to USE IT AT THE SAME TIME!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Dr. Smith from Lost in Space, of course.
Everybody knows that.
Perhaps I'm too demanding in my definition of "best" but I'd submit that any project, no matter how ambitious, would have to produce something before earning this kind of distinction.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I'm still waiting for a new planet to be added to our solar system. Hell, it's been a hundred odd years since the last one was found and some people are finding that one to be faulty? Come on people! NOTHING should take a century between updates!
This is exactly the kind of thing NASA has been trying to do in the past, and could show them the way forward.
I grew up in a small, conservative USian town and so the education that we got about space exploration was exclusively about USian missions (in fact, the school board prohibited the teaching of information about Soviet successes since they deemed such information to be unpatriotic.)
.. all of this in an environment where the temperature is 900 degrees (Fahrenheit), the atmospheric pressure is 100 times what it is on Earth, and it rains sulfuric acid. The Venera landers only operated for a few minutes each, but it's a wonder that they were ever able to operate at all! Mars looks like a cakewalk by comparison.
But the fact of the matter is that the Venera landers were a marvel of human engineering. They were able to touch down on the planet's surface, take instrument readings, and even return pictures of the planet's surface and skyline
A lot of what we know about conditions on Venus comes from the Russian missions, and it's unfortunate that more schoolchildren (at least here in the US) are not taught about it because of some skewed nationalistic agenda.
Not to mention losing 2 out of the 5 shuttles because engineers sorta just "guessed" a problem was okay.
What other option was there? I'm definitely not a NASA astro-physicist, but it seems pretty logical to me that there's no such thing as a rescue mission in space... yet. I do admit that the recent disaster might have been avoided if they would have fixed the broken tiles on the wing, but how would they do that? Do they have spare pieces of everything in the shuttle, just in case something happens? Eventually you have to realize that the chance that a relatively minor mishap could turn into a disaster might outweigh the time and cost of attempting an ad-hoc, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants temporary solution.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
ta da da .. ta da da ta da da
*opening star trek music plays*
Space-- the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission--
to explore strange new worlds...to seek out new life and new civilizations...to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Captain's Log, Stardate 2948.5.
Starship Enterprise remains stranded on the moon. We have been through a trying time. As per Starbase 11's orders, we have intentionally crashed the Enterprise into the moon, in hopes of allowing scientists on earth to observe an ejected spray of lunar ice. Our next mission is to boldly fly a balloon in the clouds of Venus.
Mr. Spock: I must say, Captain, the human mind is infinitely illogical. I am amazed at it's unconventional approach to science.*superior smile*
Dr. McCoy: Was that a smile Mr. Spock? I must say that was a definite display of human emotion.
*spock raises suspicious eyebrow*
Coming up next week: The crew of the Starship Enterprise tries to seek out new life and new civilizations by launching the SETI@HOME project.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I think it's about time we looked seriously at starting a colony on Mars. It's fairly obvious that space travel in general is still pretty risky business, so why not go for the gold, in a manner of speaking?
As long as the astronauts are risking their lives (and spending MY tax dollars), do something I'll be able to tell my grandchildren about. I don't give a rat's ass about "mapping to outer solar system cometary fields and Kuiper Belt" or looking "for water-ice on the closest planet to the Sun". Whether there's water on Mercury doesn't affect me, or my children, or their children is any discernible way. Building a city on Mars does. Let's get to it.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Oh dear, I hear some criticism of both NASA and the SETI project. Though most space exploration is driven by military-industrial interests (lots of pork; forget projects like "Star Wars" - think space-based offensive nuclear capabilities to ensure a quick-strike), SETI is interested in a more noble pursuit: are we alone? Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence (to quote Ellie from the movie Contact, "You know, there are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those had planets, all right, and if just one out of a million of those had life, and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.."). Think about the dramatic changes that the discovery of intelligent alien life might bring about. Isn't that justification enough? Humanity might even be mature enough to handle the enormous cultural differences that typically lead to conflict whenever societies foreign to each other meet. Maybe. All of this doesn't even take into account the technological improvements that result from us rising to the complex problem of space exploration. For instance, SETI@home is a model example for distributed data processing if I ever saw one. Money spent here has some positive feedback for the economy, whereas money spent on long-term welfare provides little to none (not to mention sustaining unhealthy behavior on the part of the citizens). Plus, I want to know if aliens talk and look like the stuffed ones from Toy Story, or breathe methane gas and communicate using olfactory stimulus. Talk about a hard language to decipher. ;)
[c0d3fu]: jwjb62@umr.edu || james@macrohub.com
In the next decade we will see the first of a totally new class of orbiting space telescopes - large arrays of sensors spanning many tens of miles across. These will be true orbiting interferometers which will bring amazing optical resolution to "near-earth" explorers.
The ramifications for earth-based planetary exploration are huge. Currently, work is being performed on how to keep such a satellite array in perfect alignment. Low-thrust ion engines and tide-stabilizing configurations are flying as we speak.
NASA has plans to launch the first Space-Based Interferometer in 2009. Taking into account the inevitable schedule slide, we should start seeing some really cool pictures in about 2012. AND, since the array will live relatively close to our "Big Blue Marble," it might also be a reason to keep the ISS and the manned space program in general running for another decade. All it takes is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
You know, I've never really understood this sort of comment on slashdot. I mean, we're geeks, right. I mean, something like 90% of the stories on this site revolve around how perfection in automation is practically impossible to achieve. About how, a certain level of bugs is to be expected no matter how much the software is tested.
What, exactly, makes you think that NASA has some sort of secret magic bullet that they're not telling us about? What's the reason for the space shuttles carrying astronauts? Because automation is unreliable, at best.
The scientists at NASA don't just sorta guess. They make educated guesses. Sometimes those guesses are wrong. The stuff we don't know about flight at the kind of speeds would shock you. (Try googling for "real gas effects" or "radiation heat transfer" together with "re-entry" if you're interested.) For instance I believe that on the first shuttle flight the prediction of center of lift was off by 0.7%, necessitating doubling the flap area.
So combine the science we don't fully understand with automation and we will have failures. It's just a fact. Would you prefer they didn't try?